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Long-Lived Data Collections: Enabling Digital Research and Education in the 21st Century

April 1, 2005

Chris L. Greer
Program Director
U.S. National Science Foundation

It is exceedingly rare that fundamentally new approaches to research and education arise. Information technology has ushered in such a fundamental change. Digital data collections are at the heart of this change. Through their very size and complexity, such digital collections provide new phenomena for study, enable analysis at unprecedented levels of accuracy and sophistication, and provide novel insights through innovative information integration. At the same time, such collections are a powerful force for inclusion, removing barriers to participation at all ages and levels of education.

The National Science Board recognizes the growing importance of these data collections for research and education, their potential for broadening participation in research at all levels, the ever increasing National Science Foundation investment in creating and maintaining the collections, and the rapid multiplication of collections with a potential for decades of curation. In response the Board formed the Long-Lived Data Collections Task Force. The Board and the task force undertook an analysis of the policy issues relevant to long-lived data collections. This briefing will summarize some of the findings arising from that analysis.

Web Links:
http://www.nsf.gov/nsb/

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Curation, E-Science, Repositories
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NDIIPP: Building Collaborative Digital Preservation Partnerships

April 1, 2005

William LeFurgy
Digital Initiatives Program Manager
Library of Congress

Daniel Greenstein
Associate Vice Provost for Scholarly Information
University of California

Martha Anderson
NDIIPP Program Officer
Library of Congress

In December 2000 Congress authorized the Library of Congress to develop and execute a plan for a National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP). The Library developed a plan outlining a strategy for the Library to build a national network of organizations with responsibilities for collecting digital materials, and to identify the policies, protocols and strategies needed for digital preservation. In September 2004 the Library made awards to eight institutions and their partners to identify, collect, and preserve digital materials within a collaborative digital preservation network. The institutions share responsibilities for preserving at-risk digital materials of significant cultural and historical value to the nation, including digital content relating to political web sites, public television programs, geospatial data, culture and history collections, social science data, and legal and business materials relating to the birth of the dot com era. This session will provide an update on NDIIPP overall with a focus on partnership network building activities. Speakers from the Library will outline goals for the partnerships and review progress in meeting those goals. A speaker from the California Digital Library, one of the Library’s awardees, will provide a partner’s perspective and discuss the institutional experience of participating in a national preservation network.

http://www.digitalpreservation.gov

Handout:
Press Release on NDIIPP Partnerships
http://www.digitalpreservation.gov/about/pr_093004.html

PowerPoint Presentations:
LeFurgy
Greenstein
Anderson

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Digital Preservation
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Net Generation Students and Libraries

April 1, 2005

Joan K. Lippincott
Associate Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

Libraries and digital information resources can play a critical role in the education of today’s students. There are, however, some major disconnects in the ways that students are using information, technology, and learning spaces and the ways that libraries present their information, deliver services, and provide facilities. This session follows up on a chapter in a new EDUCAUSE e-book on Educating the Net Generation, and it will describe how libraries could rethink their access mechanisms to information resources, their services, and their use of physical space to better address the learning styles of Net Gen students. Participants will be encouraged to discuss and debate the issues presented.

http://www.educause.edu/educatingthenetgen

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Learning Spaces (includes Information/Learning Commons), Net Generation (includes Millennials)
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Orphan Works (Works with Unlocatable Copyright Owners): Are They a Problem? If So, What Do We Do About It? The Copyright Office’s Study of the Issues

April 1, 2005

Marybeth Peters
Register of Copyrights
U.S. Copyright Office

The Copyright Office is examining the issues raised by “orphan works,” i.e., copyrighted works whose owners are difficult or even impossible to locate. Concerns have been raised that the uncertainty surrounding ownership of such works might needlessly discourage subsequent creators and users from incorporating such works in new creative efforts or making such works available to the public. As part of their study, the Copyright Office requested written comments from all interested parties. Specifically, the Office sought comments on whether there are compelling concerns raised by orphan works that merit a legislative, regulatory or other solution, and what type of solution could effectively address these concerns without conflicting with the legitimate interests of authors and right holders.

Web Sites:
http://www.copyright.gov/orphan

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Intellectual Property
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Partnering to Provide Rich Media Assets for Teaching and Learning: Cdigix

April 1, 2005

Chuck Powell
Director, Academic Media & Technology
Yale University

Yale has been engaged in a two year project to determine whether Cdigix could add value to the process of delivering educational materials to students over the campus network (primarily video). Several units on campus, including ITS, were already performing this function (for example classes.yale.edu) but the goal was to make it easier and more cost effective for the institution.

Web Links:
http://www.yale.edu/amt/director/CDigix%20Overview%20CNI_v1.ppt

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Teaching & Learning
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Public Domain Art in an Age of Easier Mechanical Reproducibility

April 1, 2005

Kenneth Hamma
Executive Director, Digital Policy & Initiatives
J. Paul Getty Trust

Instead of asserting intellectual property rights in images of public domain works as nearly every art museum does now, it is argued here that publicly and pro-actively placing these images in the public domain and clearly removing all questions about their availability for use and reuse would likely cause no harm to the financial position or trustworthy reputation of any collecting institution and would demonstrably contribute to the public good. As those images have become digital assets and as the preferred delivery venue has become increasingly an electronic network, the ante has been raised to do so. The manner in which this might be done may require consultation with legal counsel. The fact of doing it, however, is not a legal decision but a business decision that can be evaluated by non-profits in measuring success against the mission.

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Intellectual Property
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A Radioactive Metadata Record Approach for Interoperability Testing

April 1, 2005

William E. Moen
Interim Director, Texas Center for Digital Knowledge
University of North Texas

This project briefing describes how funding from two Institute of Museum and Library Services National Leadership Grants is being used to: 1) explore an alternative approach for interoperability testing in the context of Z39.50 clients and servers, and MARC-based online library catalogs (Z-Interop2 Project); and 2) produce empirical evidence regarding library catalogers’ use of MARC content designation (MARC Content Designation Utilization Project). The Z-Interop2 Project has developed a method for interoperability testing using specially designed diagnostic MARC bibliographic records, which we call Radioactive MARC Records. These records support interoperability testing to assess Z39.50 protocol interoperability, information retrieval search functionality, and local indexing policies. These factors can affect the extent of interoperability between systems. Further, we have developed test scripts that automatically send test searches, retrieve results in the form of one or more of the diagnostic MARC records, and generate reports of search success or failures. Automating these processes substantially improves the efficiency of our interoperability testbed. Several sets of diagnostic MARC records have been created, differing in the content designation populated. Determining the fields and subfields to populate is based on analyzing the frequency of occurrence of the content designation in a large set of MARC records. A preliminary analysis of 400,000 MARC bibliographic records from OCLC’s WorldCat database indicated about 5% of available MARC content designation accounted for over 80% of all occurrences. Further analysis is being undertaken in the MARC Content Designation Utilization Project. We believe that the alternative approach to interoperability testing can be extended to address other protocol and metadata environments, and similarly, the methodology for analysis of MARC content designation utilization can be adapted by other metadata communities to assess the utilization of different metadata schemes.

Web Links:
http://www.unt.edu/zinterop
http://www.mcdu.unt.edu

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Metadata
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Shibboleth and InCommon: Beginning the Migration of Library Services

April 1, 2005

Steven Carmody
Project Manager, Internet2 – Shibboleth
Brown University

Clifford A. Lynch
Executive Director
Coalition for Networked Information (CNI)

Shibboleth, an inter-institutional approach to resource sharing, has made steady progress since its first conceptual presentation at CNI almost four years ago, and is now in rapidly widening deployment. InCommon, the federated trust mechanism that builds on Shibboleth to enable real production use, is now in operation (as are production Federations in several other countries). A growing number of commercial information providers are implementing Shibboleth.

As campus libraries now consider the migration from IP-based access control to Shibboleth, what issues must they face? What approaches are viable? What factors could affect the timing of the decision to begin the migration?

http://shibboleth.internet2.edu

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval, Intellectual Property
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Squeezing Metadata Out of Scholarly Texts: Extending the CLiMB Project

April 1, 2005

Judith Klavans
Director of Research, Center for Advanced Study of Language
University of Maryland

Marilyn Domas White
Associate Professor
University of Maryland

Angela Giral
Director (retired), Avery Library
Columbia University

The goal of Phase One of the CLiMB (Computational Linguistics for Metadata Building) project was to discover to what extent and under which circumstances computational linguistics techniques could be used to extract descriptive metadata from texts associated with image collections. Toward that end, CLiMB developed a prototype toolkit, which enabled the identification and extraction of terms from text describing images. Criteria for selecting collections were established, and evaluation of the toolkit was performed over a set of initial collections. Originally funded at Columbia University, CLiMB has received a planning grant for Phase Two, in which the project is transitioning to its new home at the University of Maryland (UMD). The goals of “CLiMB-2” are to:
• identify a set of collections appropriate for testing CLiMB
• improve the CLiMB toolkit with the goal of helping the cataloger work more efficiently (i.e. more breadth in less time)
• apply the improved toolkit to extract descriptive metadata for these collections
• study the usability of the CLiMB toolkit and evaluate how it helps users

We are currently identifying museum and library partners with appropriate collections and user groups with a view toward evaluating the modified toolkit and assessing its impact on retrieval in real settings. The purpose of this project briefing is to present the vision and implementation plan for CLiMB-2 at UMD and to build additional relevant partnerships.

http://www.columbia.edu/cu/libraries/inside/projects/climb
http://www.umiacs.umd.edu/~climb

Handout (MS Word)

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Metadata
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Stanford “Groks”: Using Grokker at Stanford

April 1, 2005

Chris Bourg
Associate Director for Communications
Stanford University

Jerry C. Persons
Chief Information Architect
Stanford University

Stanford Grokker is the result of an innovative partnership between Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) and Grokker. Grokker does 2 things that we (SULAIR) have been looking for: 1. Grokker provides “federated” or “broadcast” search ability; that is, it provides the ability to send a search query to several resources simultaneously. 2. Grokker also returns search results in a way that is more useful, and much easier to navigate than the usual list format. Grokker groups the results topically, and presents them in an interactive visual map. The Grokker map is easy to navigate and allows users to quickly get to relevant results.

In this presentation, we will describe our codevelopment process with Grokker, and discuss how Grokker is being used at Stanford.

http://library.stanford.edu/about_sulair/special_projects/stanford_grokker.html

Handout:

http://library.stanford.edu/about_sulair/special_projects/stanford_grokker_faqs.html

PowerPoint Presentation

Filed Under: CNI Spring 2005 Project Briefings, Information Access & Retrieval
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